A British government-funded fake TV news service allows mild criticism of the US – all the better to support it.

A succession of scandals in the US has revealed widespread government funding of PR agencies to produce “fake news”. Actors take the place of journalists and the “news” is broadcast as if it were genuine. The same practice has been adopted in Iraq, where newspapers have been paid to insert copy. These stories have raised the usual eyebrows in the UK about the pitiful quality of US democracy. Things are better here, we imply. We have a prime minister who claimed in 2004 that “the values that drive our actions abroad are the same values of progress and justice that drive us at home”. Yet in 2002 the government launched a littleknown television propaganda service that seems to mimic the US government’s deceptive approach to fake news.
guardian.co.uk

…Military police today arrested two more soldiers in connection with the video showing the apparent abuse of Iraqi civilians by British troops.

The arrests – which bring the number detained up to three – came as the fallout from the footage saw the provincial council in Basra suspend relations with the British.

The video, filmed in the restive town of Amara in the Maysan province, just north of Basra, in January 2004 appeared to show defenceless young Iraqis being kicked and attacked with batons, to the apparent amusement of the cameraman.
guardian.co.uk

…he Pentagon does not pinpoint the countries it sees as future areas of operations but they will stretch beyond the Middle East to the Horn of Africa, north Africa, central and south-east Asia and the northern Caucasus.

The cold war dominated the world from 1946 to 1991: the long war could determine the shape of the world for decades to come. The plan rests heavily on a much higher level of cooperation and integration with Britain and other Nato allies, and the increased recruitment of regional governments through the use of economic, political, military and security means. It calls on allies to build their capacity “to share the risks and responsibilities of today’s complex challenges”.

The Pentagon must become adept at working with interior ministries as well as defence ministries, the report says. It describes this as “a substantial shift in emphasis that demands broader and more flexible legal authorities and cooperative mechanisms … Bringing all the elements of US power to bear to win the long war requires overhauling traditional foreign assistance and export control activities and laws.”
guardian.co.uk

…Assuming, then, a near year to come of withdrawal buzz, speculation, and even a media blitz of withdrawal announcements, the question is: How can anybody tell if the Bush administration is actually withdrawing from Iraq or not? Sometimes, when trying to cut through a veritable fog of misinformation and disinformation, it helps to focus on something concrete. In the case of Iraq, nothing could be more concrete — though less generally discussed in our media — than the set of enormous bases the Pentagon has long been building in that country. Quite literally multi-billions of dollars have gone into them. In a prestigious engineering magazine in late 2003, Lt. Col. David Holt, the Army engineer “tasked with facilities development” in Iraq, was already speaking proudly of several billion dollars being sunk into base construction (“the numbers are staggering”). Since then, the base-building has been massive and ongoing.

In a country in such startling disarray, these bases, with some of the most expensive and advanced communications systems on the planet, are like vast spaceships that have landed from another solar system. Representing a staggering investment of resources, effort, and geostrategic dreaming, they are the unlikeliest places for the Bush administration to hand over willingly to even the friendliest of Iraqi governments.
informationclearinghouse.info

WASHINGTON (AP) – Pre-Sept. 11 intelligence conducted by a secret military unit identified terrorist ringleader Mohamed Atta 13 different times, a congressman said Tuesday.

During a Capitol Hill news conference, Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., said the unit – code-named “Able Danger” – also identified “a problem” in Yemen two weeks before the attack on the USS Cole. It knew the problem was tied into the port of Aden and involved a U.S. platform, but the ship commander was not made aware of it, Weldon said.
guardian.co.uk

Gee, you think they didn’t want to catch him?

The state pharmacy board ordered Wal-Mart on Tuesday to stock emergency contraception pills at its stores in Massachusetts.

Massachusetts becomes second state to require the world’s largest retailer to carry the morning-after pill.

A Wal-Mart spokesman said the company would comply with the directive by the Massachusetts Board of Pharmacy and is reviewing its nationwide policy on the drug.

“Clearly women’s health is a high priority for Wal-Mart,” spokesman Dan Fogleman said. “We are actively thinking through the issue.”

Wal-Mart now carries the pill only in Illinois, where it is required to do so under state law. The company has said it “chooses not to carry many products for business reasons,” but has refused to elaborate.
breitbart.com

WASHINGTON (AP) — Despite record profits, oil and gas producers may avoid billions of dollars in royalty payments to the government because of a decade-old law designed to spur production when energy prices are low.

The Interior Department estimates that as much as $66 billion worth of oil and natural gas taken from the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico between now and 2011 will be exempt from government royalty payments.

That could amount to the government losing an estimated $7 billion to $9.5 billion based on anticipated production and current price projections for oil and gas, according to an analysis in the department’s five-year budget plan.
nytimes.com

WASHINGTON – President Bush has requested billions more to prepare for potential disasters such as a biological attack or an influenza epidemic, but his proposed budget for next year would zero out popular health projects that supporters say target more mundane, but more certain, killers.

If enacted, the 2007 budget would eliminate federal programs that support inner-city Indian health clinics, defibrillators in rural areas, an educational campaign about Alzheimer’s disease, traumatic brain-injury centers, and a nationwide registry for Lou Gehrig’s disease. It would cut close to $1 billion in health care grants to states and would kill the entire budget of the Christopher and Dana Reeve Paralysis Resource Center.

In a $2.8 trillion budget, the amounts involved may seem minuscule, but proponents argue that the health care projects Bush has singled out are the “ultimate homeland security,” as Vinay Nadkarni put it. The spokesman for the American Heart Association said he cannot fathom why the administration has recommended eliminating a $1.5 million program that provides defibrillators to rural communities and trains local personnel on how to use the machines to restart hearts that go into cardiac arrest.
bradenton.com

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, Feb. 13 — Haiti’s hopes for a peaceful presidential election exploded Monday in a torrent of violence as mobs overturned cars, set piles of tires ablaze and built elaborate roadblocks across major highways, protesting delays in the vote count and alleged fraud in last Tuesday’s balloting.

Demonstrators paralyzed cities across the country, from Cap-Haitien in the north to this impoverished seaside capital, where tens of thousands of people took to the streets to demand that Rene Preval — a former president and favorite of this city’s poor — be named president.

Haiti’s distinctive “tap-taps,” the colorfully painted trucks that ferry hundreds of thousands of passengers a day, were effectively stilled by roadblocks, set up by armed thugs demanding bribes, on the major arteries connecting cities.

In Port-au-Prince, at least one protester was killed, a luxury hotel was occupied by demonstrators and the international airport was closed. There were reports that U.N peacekeeping forces had shot into the crowds, but U.N. officials here said they had fired only into the air.

U.N. troops did not intervene when a boisterous crowd burst into the Montana Hotel, where election results were being prepared, and ran through the halls and jumped into the pool.

Hoping to quell the unrest, Preval — who is far ahead of all rivals with 90 percent of votes counted — flew to the capital late Monday on a U.N. helicopter from his home town in a remote mountain village. Preval had urged calm in recent days, but he had also stoked emotions among followers by accusing Haiti’s electoral commission of lowering his vote total to force him into a runoff and by mockingly singing, “They’re stealing our votes,” on his porch.

“We have questions about the electoral process,” Preval told reporters late Monday after meeting with the top U.N. official in Haiti and ambassadors from the United States, France, Canada and Brazil. “We want to see how we can save the process.”
washingtonpost.com

As Haiti intrudes again on the U.S. consciousness with a new round of troubled elections, Americans see a violent, backward, poverty-stricken country run by descendants of African slaves. There are feelings of condescension mixed with a touch of racism.

But what few Americans know is that they owe this Caribbean nation a profound historical debt. Indeed, perhaps no nation has done more for the United States than Haiti and been treated as badly in return.

If not for Haiti – which in the 1700s rivaled the American colonies as the most valuable European possession in the Western Hemisphere – the course of U.S. history would have been very different. It is possible that the United States might never have expanded much beyond the Appalachian Mountains.
consortiumnews.com